WITH two expanding colonial empires situated as were those
of France and England in North America at the middle of
the eighteenth century, conflict over the upper Ohio Valley
was inevitable. The character of the struggle was greatly influenced,
however, and to a large extent its outcome was determined, by differences between those colonial empires. New France consisted of a small
agricultural settlement in the St. Lawrence Valley, a still smaller one
on the lower Mississippi, and a few villages at wide intervals from one
another in the interior. The character of French colonization is indicated by its typical institutions--the trading post, the fort, and the
mission--one or more of which was to be found in each settlement,
while others occupied isolated sites in the wilderness. The natural
increase among the habitants was large, but immigration, restricted to
French Catholics, was very small. The total white population of New
France, including Louisiana, probably did not exceed eighty thousand.

The English colonies occupied a more restricted territory stretching
along the coast from New Hampshire to Georgia and hemmed in on
the west by the mountains. Already the first mountain barrier, the
Blue Ridge, had been crossed, and the frontiersmen were knocking at
the portals of the Allegheny Front. The original English, Dutch, and
Swedish settlers had multiplied rapidly, and large accessions of immigrants from Europe, especially of Germans and Scotch-Irish, had
brought the total white population to about a million and a quarter.
Both Virginia and Pennsylvania, the two colonies most concerned in
this story, had a population several times as large as that of all New
France. The typical institutions of the English colonies were the farm,
the plantation, and the commercial town. Indian traders operated on
the frontier, as has been seen, but the main interest of the settlers in
the English colonies was the establishment of permanent homes where
they could sustain themselves by agricultural operations.

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.